John McGahern - Creatures of the Earth - New and Selected Stories

The moon of the night before lit the pale sedge. He could see the dark shapes of the heather, the light on the larger lakes of sedge, but he had no desire to walk out into the night. Blurred with tiredness and whiskey, all shapes and lives seemed to merge comfortably into one another as the pale, ghostly sedge and the dark heather merged under the moon. Except for the stirrings of animals about the house and a kittiwake calling sharply high up over the bog and the barking of distant dogs, the night was completely silent. There was not even a passing motor. But before he lay down like a dog under the eiderdown in the lower room he remembered to set the alarm of his travelling clock for seven the next morning.

In spite of a throbbing forehead he was the first person in the dining-room of the Royal Hotel for breakfast the next morning. After managing to get through most of a big fry — sausages, black pudding, bacon, scrambled eggs and three pots of black coffee — he was beginning to feel much better when Fonsie and John came in for their breakfast.

‘I wouldn’t advise the coffee though I’m awash with the stuff,’ Philly said as the two brothers looked through the menu.

‘We never have coffee in the house except when you’re back,’ Fonsie said.

‘I got used to it out there. The Americans drink nothing else throughout the day.’

‘They’re welcome to it,’ Fonsie said.

John looked from one brother to the other but kept his silence. Both brothers ordered tea and scrambled eggs on toast.

‘What did you two do last night?’

‘I’m afraid we had pints, too many pints,’ John answered.

‘You had no pints, only glasses,’ Fonsie said.

‘It all totted up to pints and there were too many. This wild life doesn’t suit me. How you are able to move around this morning I don’t know.’

‘That’s nothing,’ Fonsie said. ‘And you should see yer man here when he gets going; then you’d have a chance to talk. It’s all or nothing. There’s never any turning back.’

As Philly was visibly discomforted, John asked, ‘What did you do?’

‘I thanked the Cullens.’

‘More whiskey,’ Fonsie crowed.

‘Then I opened the iron box,’ Philly ignored the gibe. ‘I found the deeds. We’ll need them for the lawyer in a few minutes. And there was another wad of money. There was sterling and dollars and a few Australian notes as well.’

‘The sterling and dollars came from the brother and sister. They were probably sent to the mother and never cashed. God knows where the Australian came from,’ John said.

‘It all comes to thousands,’ Philly said.

‘When we used to go there you’d think we were starving him out of the place.’

‘They probably didn’t have it then.’

‘Even if they did it would still have been the same. It’s a way of thinking.’

‘The poor fucker, it’d make you laugh,’ Fonsie said. ‘Making pigs and horses out of matchsticks in the night, slaving on the bog or running after cattle in the day, when he could have gone out and had himself a good time.’

‘Maybe that was his way of having a good time,’ John said carefully.

‘It’ll get some good scattering now,’ Fonsie laughed at Philly.

‘Are you sure?’ Philly said sternly back. ‘It all goes to Mother anyhow. She’s the next of kin. Maybe you’ll give it the scattering? I have lots for myself.’

‘Mr Big again,’ Fonsie jeered.

‘It’s time to go to see this lawyer. Do you want to come?’

‘I have more sense,’ Fonsie answered angrily.

The brown photos around the walls of the solicitor’s waiting room as well as the heavy mahogany table and leather chairs told that the practice was old, that it had been passed from grandfather Reynolds to father to son. The son was about fifty, dressed in a beautifully cut dark pinstripe suit, his grey hair parted in the centre. His manner was soft and urbane and quietly watchful.

Philly had asked John to state their business, which he did with simple clarity. As he spoke Philly marvelled at his brother. Even if it meant saving his own life he’d never have been able to put the business so neatly without sidetracking or leaving something out.

‘My advice would be to lose that money,’ the solicitor said when he had finished. ‘Strictly, I shouldn’t be giving that advice but as far as I’m concerned I never heard anything about it.’

Both brothers nodded their understanding and gratitude.

‘Almost certainly there’s no will. I’d have it if there was. I acted for Peter in a few matters. There was a case of trespass and harassment by a neighbouring family called Whelan a few years back. None of it was Peter’s fault. They were a bad lot and solved our little problem by emigrating en masse to the States. Peter’s friend, Jim Cullen, bought their land.’

Philly remembered wild black-haired Marie Whelan who had challenged him to fight on the bog road during one of those last summers. John just nodded that he remembered the family.

‘So everything should go to your mother as the only surviving next of kin. As she is a certain age it should be acted on quickly and I’ll be glad to act as soon as I learn what it is your mother wants.’ As he spoke he opened the deeds Philly gave John to hand over. ‘Peter never even bothered to have the deeds changed into his name. The place is in your grandfather’s name and this document was drawn up by my grandfather.’

‘Would the place itself be worth much?’ Philly’s sudden blunt question surprised John. Out of his quietness Mr Reynolds looked up at him sharply.

‘I fear not a great deal. Ten or eleven thousand. A little more if there was local competition. I’d say fourteen at the very most.’

‘You can’t buy a room for that in the city and there’s almost thirty acres with the small house.’

‘Well, it’s not the city and I do not think Gloria Bog is ever likely to become the Costa Brava.’

Philly noticed that both the solicitor and his brother were looking at him with withdrawn suspicion if not distaste. They were plainly thinking that greed had propelled him to stumble into the inquiry he had made when it was the last thing in the world he had in mind. Before anything further could be said, the solicitor was shaking both their hands at the door and nodding over their shoulders to the receptionist behind her desk across the hallway to take their particulars before showing them out.

In contrast to the removal of the previous evening, when the church had been full to overflowing, there were only a few dozen people at the funeral Mass. Eight cars followed the hearse to Killeelan, and only the Mercedes turned into the narrow laneway behind the hearse. The other mourners abandoned their cars at the road and entered the lane on foot. Blackthorn and briar scraped against the windscreen and sides of the Mercedes as they moved behind the hearse’s slow pace. At the end of the lane there was a small clearing in front of the limestone wall that ringed the foot of Killeelan Hill. There was just enough space in the clearing for the hearse and the Mercedes to park on either side of the small iron gate in the wall. The coffin was taken from the hearse and placed on the shoulders of John and Philly and the two Cullens. The gate was just wide enough for them to go through. Fonsie alone stayed behind in the front seat of the Mercedes and watched the coffin as it slowly climbed the hill on the four shoulders. The coffin went up and up the steep hill, sometimes swaying dangerously, and then anxious hands of the immediate followers would go up against the back of the coffin. The shadows of the clouds swept continually over the green hill and brown varnish of the coffin. Away on the bog they were a darker, deeper shadow as the clouds travelled swiftly over the pale sedge. Three times the small snail-like cortège stopped completely for the bearers to be changed. As far as Fonsie could see — he would have needed binoculars to be certain — they were the original bearers, his brothers and the two Cullens, who took up the coffin the third and last time and carried it through the small gate in the wall around the graveyard on the hilltop. Then it was only the coffin itself and the heads of the mourners that could be seen until they were lost in the graveyard evergreens. In spite of his irritation at this useless ceremony, that seemed only to show some deep love of hardship or enslavement — they’d be hard put to situate the graveyard in a more difficult or inaccessible place except on the very top of a mountain — he found the coffin and the small band of toiling mourners unbearably moving as it made its low stumbling climb up the hill, and this deepened further his irritation and the sense of complete uselessness.